It was fun being other people and things, regardless of who watched; as I grew a bit older, I had thought that the characters I pretended to be were far more interesting than who I was. Even now, at 30, I feel that I’m preparing a few roles simultaneously for a production that will never happen. In my files of the current characters I play, there are: The high school drama teacher, The writer, The out of work actor, The business man, The perpetual boyfriend, The lost brother, The chosen son, The recovering addict, and The romantic traveler( all characters played with the same tone for the most part- low brow and angry). I have left the pursuit of acting professionally; I don’t take acting classes, I don’t seek auditions, and I think I’m better for it. Though, I still teach it; however one can teach “acting.”

Characters don’t need names. I still fluctuate back and forth between using the last names of “Baldizon” and “Rojas,” both names I have a rich history with: “Rojas” is my legal birth name and it belonged to a man that I found out, at the age of 22, wasn’t my real father; this was good news, I wasn’t fond of the man and I would feel guilty for passing on his name in the case of me having children . He and my mother divorced before I was born. My real father was a Cuban attorney with the last name “Guzman.” I opted not to take his name because I wasn’t too familiar him; as a kid, I always knew him as my mother’s attorney, and found it odd that he took special interest in me on the rare occasions he came over to the house to discuss “legal matters” with my mother. So I chose, in my mid 20s, to go by the name “Baldizon,” because it is my mother’s maiden name, and I wanted to honor her and her family lineage. Its hard keeping track of who you are.

When I read Await Your Reply over Thanksgiving weekend, I was staying with family.

I like being around my family during the holidays because they refuse to acknowledge my character driven performances; to my mother and brother I am simply son and brother. And I feel fresh with them, as if I just got off stage from performing my only scene and was now able to sit backstage and leisurely remove my makeup.

Await Your Reply moved me because it is a novel that tells the tale of a few people searching for identity while leaving old ones behind. Specifically, the book tells 3 stories: the story of a father and son, teacher and student, and 2 brothers. The first page opens with a father rushing his son to the hospital, on the seat beside them, the son’s hand is laying in a Styrofoam cooler. We meet a young teacher and a student that he is having a romantic relationship with, they are fleeing their former lives that be would cloaked in taboo. We meet a brother searching for his awkward twin brother that everybody has deemed crazy and clinically schizophrenic.

I felt from the first page on that the author had trust and confidence in me; he invited me to journey with the characters , slowly revealing along the way back story, insights, and confessions. He knew that I would keep up.

These are tales of people; imagining they were someone else, longing to be someone else, and having to be someone else. Identity is the central character in the book, and we reflect early on in the novel, that identity, like culture, is not something your born with, but something you learn. And all people are subject to the learning curve.

I finished the book in a few days, and realized that it would make a wonderful manual to an actor in training. I realized that this book destroys the convention of what actors call character building and replaces it, philosophically and semantically, with a new approach– identity creating. Character’s are stock, cliches, made up mostly of projected social perceptions, nameless and void. But figuring out what a character’s personal identity is is the true quest of the actor. Its what makes a genuine performance. Its what brings it its RPGs (Raw, Pulse and Grit).

My advanced acting students read excerpts by great illustrious acting technicians ranging from Stella Adler, Michael Chekhov, Bertolt Brecht, and Stanislavsky. I will assign Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply next semester.

The file of characters I have: The high school drama teacher, the writer, the out of work actor, the business man, the perpetual boyfriend, the lost brother, the chosen son, the recovering addict, and the romantic traveler; they all have an identity, my own.

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• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth

By the end of a reading session, I’m coughing and gagging like a character in his stories( lets call it “method reading”). Pipe tobacco is a nice compliment to a McCarthy novel: the aromatic presence smells of early Americana, the steam in the lungs verges on like an early locomotive , the wooden and sweet taste on the lips tastes like what I fantasize Appalachian dew would taste like, and the humidity in the mouth is like a camp fire shared with rogues. The pipe and tobacco are my wardrobe to his Narnia, and once your done with about 5 bowls of smoke, it becomes difficult to breathe, and only some of that difficulty can be attributed to the pipe. Outer Dark left me out of breath; a literary asthma attack propelled by a respiratory one.

Outer Dark is Cormac McCarthy’s second novel and should be accompanied by a glass of bourbon(for non-drinkers: a  glass of water-no ice.) The book is set in timeless Appalachia, but we understand soon  that time is nearing it’s end. If the reader chose, this book could be a prequel to The Road, as if the characters in both novels were edging on opposite sides of McCarthy’s apocalypse. In Outer Dark, a lonely sister gives birth to child she conceived with her brother . They live alone in the woods, so alone, that the lines of brother, sister and lover never seemed to have existed between these two. After the baby is born, the brother takes the baby deep into the woods and leaves it there, only to be picked up by a traveling tinker. What ensues is a pair of separate journeys , as the sister looks for her missing  baby and the brother looks  for work and his sister.

This story reads as a Southern fable; around each corner a new figure is met, or a new abode is entered, or an element of nature hardens the journey of our travelers. Life is gritty, violent,  and unforgiving in Appalachia. McCarthy’s imagery juxtaposes the mythological with the real, creating a new modern tragedy that makes us believe we can tear down the sheets of  its realist drama to expose a dark  phantasmagoria  lurking behind it. There is no chorus; they are dead, or have abandoned us.

Besides the brother and sister, whose names are Culla and Rinthy; all characters are depicted by their design:The man with the beard, The tinker and his “shoddy carilon”, The blind man,  and The mute one. But the nameless ones know something that Culla and Rinthy do not, that their journeys are futile and that they have already reached their destination . As The man with the beard says at one point in the novel: they say people in hell ain’t got names. But they had to be called something to get sent there.

I look away from the book and stare at the bridge of my pipe. I appreciate  how it reams and curves to the smoking dark pit of the bowl. I take a few puffs and see the smoke rise quickly in shouts, and there they are, little Culla and Rinthy walking to their end; I see them walking down the bridge of briar to the pit. Method Reading.

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
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• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth

Charles Bukowski’s Henry Chinaski character is starting to emerge as a successful poet, and consequently has a bit more money to buy booze, a bit more time to write, and a lot of time to be the philandering sensitive brute with women (think Shrek, rated R).

Bukowski gives insight on how becoming a famous writer helped him compensate for the lack of sex during his younger years; now, at 50 , an old man with a strong pickled libido, he is falling in an out of love faster than he penetrates and orgasms. This story has him encounter a variety of different muses: some crazy, some rich, some ugly, some with “big vaginas”, some smart, some plain, some with kids, and some that live in Texas. We experience a man go through a circus of sexual romps, alcoholic fits of anger, seldom joy, and moments of sensitivity and beauty revealed in between grunts and swigs.

But Bukowski’s most loyal braud, the one that he calls home, is Los Angeles. Bukowski is the anthropologist of LA. He writes about it with a fervent desire to see her immortalized through the people, the liquor shops, Vermont ave, Santa Monica, and Hollywood; all LA has been caught in the spell of his writing and it is Los Angeles, the city without a writer, a city found mostly in the mystery section of the book store, that is given its proper due.

I finished this book and one thought came to mind: this was one of the most romantic books I have ever read. A love story written in prose that is real to the love experience: revealing and sudden as a slap in the face, raw as hot pink sex, hungered for like a 2:00 am hot dog wrapped in bacon, and fast and fleeting as the next moment. Some have criticized this book as being misogynistic with boasts of sexual conquest by a dirty old man. But its not a boast as much as a confession. The man wants to love, the man wants to be smoothed; there is a scene in the book where one of his women is enjoying bursting the blackhead zits on his body, a ritual she does before they have sex, and it almost left me weeping. A story of a man searching through vaginas and beer bottles in order to find love and happiness. Or, at the very least, a threesome with Los Angeles and a whore.

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth